Chris Kelso > Chris's Quotes

“Truth cannot be imparted," said Kline. "It must be inflicted.”
― Brian Evenson

“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
― Alasdair Gray

“I have been writing my heart out all my life, but only getting a living out of it now, and the attacks are coming in thick. A lot of people are mad and jealous and bitter and I only hope they also can be heard by an expanding publishing program the size of Russia's. Because it's not a question of the merit of art, but a question of spontaneity and sincerity and joy I say. I would like everybody in the world to tell his full life confession and tell it HIS OWN WAY and then we'd have something to read in our old age, instead of the hesitations and cavilings of 'men of letters' with blear faces who only alter words that the Angel brought them.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”
― Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Failure doesn't mean anything, it just means changing paths.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky

“Never to whine; to accept what came; to wait for better; to take what you could; to let no one, not even yourself, know how near to giving in you were.”
― Robin Jenkins, The Changeling

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I’ve concluded that happiness lives in the ephemera. You cannot see it, nor can it be considered tangible. It’s not quite an optical illusion—no, not quite—but if you try to catch it, with the ultimate intention of somehow sustaining it for a prolonged period, then happiness will quickly dissolve to grief and disappointment—inevitably, fatally.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“In the censored-city, our only access to the outside is through the cloud. Sometimes I feel safer here, with all the screeds of data smog and oversaturated pop culture references condensed to their basic minimum. I mean, the sheer amount of input to our system has long since exceeded our processing capacity. We all felt the same way. Spam and social media had taken over everything. I remember it, clear as day.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“The two men drag Janice’s half-dissected body out to the front porch and drop her on the wild lawn. She disappears beneath a sea of unploughed yellow strands and broom straw. The sky has a milky hue, Vince realises that he can no longer appreciate the beauty in anything except violence…”
― Chris Kelso, The Dregs Trilogy

“He drags me outside where the weather is bone-achingly cold. Knelt on the gale-lashed sidewalk I spit out a gruel of blood and look up at the beleaguered Time Detective.

“What’s this about?”

His jaw line clenches, I just know that beneath the chronovisor is a stare completely divorced from reality.

“You’re going to Moscow Novikov.”
― Chris Kelso, The Folger Variation

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Goodwill certainly seems to be in abundance on a superficial
level, but does it have genuine truth or is it some kind of trivial
social camouflage? If it did then surely connection would be
simpler and would occur on a more regular basis. I’m also aware
that the materiality of our reality conditions the connection of
everything with everything else. I know we are cosmically bound,
like the milling atoms of a crystal—interdependent particles
oscillating together in the quest for structural integrity.”
― Chris Kelso

“Let’s argue that reality is plural: the solipsistic loneliness of individual perception becomes our first hurdle. We try to get over that by sharing some kind of rudimentary interior with others—where common goals and grammars can unite and define us as joint proprietors of a greater cognitive space.”
― chris kelso, Interrogating the Abyss

“A black watery sludge of crippling consciousness sloshes around my head in loose bilge, ebbing and flowing with each panic-surge of electrical energy. The effects soon become psychosomatic: it’s an internal sensation that wets my palms, prickles my scalp with fear and fills the already-clogged neural funnels in my brain space with anti-natal thoughts. I wish I could stem the torrent of noxious bilge water, even for a moment. My head feels constipated.”
― Chris Kelso, Interrogating the Abyss

“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.”
― David Cronenberg

“Some black swirl behind a wall said to roil and lust after human flesh and bone, sucking limbs into primal, pre-creation chaos...”
― Chris Kelso, Voidheads

“McNeil harboured fantasies of his own physical deterioration, about making love to the great wound of the universe, coalescing with.”
― Chris Kelso, Voidheads

“When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there’s your proof.”
― Dennis Cooper

“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“Pain is closer to love than indifference, right?”
― Elle Nash, Animals Eat Each Other

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets